BERLIN.- The Scharf Collection, one of the most significant private art collections in Germany, is being showcased in a large-scale exhibition for the very first time. The collection primarily consists of French art from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as international contemporary artworks. The exhibition in the Alte Nationalgalerie presents a selection of some 150 items, including prominent artworks by the likes of Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, and takes visitors on a journey through the collection: from Goya and French Realism to the French Impressionists and Cubists to contemporary art. One special highlight is a selection of prints by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which have been almost fully preserved in the collection.

The Scharf Collection is a direct continuation of what was once Otto Gerstenberg’s extensive private Berlin-based art collection, which encompassed the dawn of modernism with artworks by Goya to the pioneers of the French avant-garde with works by Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas.

Gerstenberg’s daughter Margarethe Scharf was able to preserve the majority of the collection despite considerable war losses suffered during the Second World War. His grandsons Walther and Dieter Scharf each went on to establish their own collections based on the artworks that had been bequeathed to them, with Dieter Scharf focussing on surrealism. His collection has been on permanent loan to the Nationalgalerie in the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg since 2008.

Walther Scharf and his wife Eve – in collaboration with their son René – further consolidated the French focus of the collection, acquiring works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Today, René Scharf and his wife Christiane have shifted their focus to contemporary art and harbour a particular interest in the ways in which the medium of painting has expanded over time and the relationship between representational and abstract imagery. Against this backdrop, René and Christiane Scharf continue to modernise the family tradition of art collecting by acquiring works by Sam Francis, Sean Scully, Daniel Richter and Katharina Grosse.

Painting Modern Life: Impressionism

Hardly any other artistic movement of the 19th century is as revered as French Impressionism. With a swift application of thick swatches of paint and a new attention to light, colour, and atmosphere, the “painters of modern life” (Charles Baudelaire) sought to capture the transience of the moment. The Scharf Collection contains magnificent examples of this art. Otto Gerstenberg concentrated on collecting French art, and Walther, Eve and René Scharf have continued with this focus.

For his landscapes, Monet was interested in the interplay of light and colour. In his paintings Steep Cliffs near Dieppe (1897) and Waterloo Bridge (1903), which are both part of painting series, Monet was investigating how his subject changed with the light.

Auguste Renoir was primarily dedicated to portraiture and depictions of society. His portraits of women reflect the ideal of the modern, elegant Parisienne.

Edgar Degas was also famous for his depictions of women. He often showed them backstage or in everyday situations, for example washing or combing their hair – usually unposed and observed from a distance. His focus here was on light, posture and composition.

A generation later, Pierre Bonnard would reconnect with this intimacy and sensuality when depicting his wife Marthe in the bathtub.

It can be said that no other painter of Post-Impressionism engaged with landscape painting as radically as Paul Cézanne. In his works, he emphasizes the texture of the painting surface and the basic shapes of pictorial elements. His experiments were groundbreaking for modernism.

Between Horror and Spectacle: Francisco de Goya

In the 19th century, interest in Spanish art grew in France. Many artists, such as Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas and Honoré Daumier, were enthusiastic about Francisco de Goya, and interest in his art also grew in Germany. Collectors in Berlin were eager to acquire Spanish art, and in this spirit Otto Gerstenberg purchased drawings, watercolours and the four large series of prints by Goya: Disparates, Caprichos, Desastres de la Guerra and Tauromaquia.

The bullfighting scenes in Tauromaquia fascinated Central European audiences, bringing them face to face with the drama of this Spanish custom. The series was interpreted as both approving of the national sport, which Goya held in high regard, but also as a critical depiction. Some identified literary references, for example to Don Nicolas Fernández de Moratín’s history of bullfighting. And some saw the bulls as representing Spanish resistance against the Napoleonic occupation.

This political dimension became even more evident in Desastres, which Goya began in 1810. Although the artist did not explicitly reference the war of independence against France, the connection is plain to see. Unsparingly, he shows the cruelty of war: death, torture, desperation and hunger. The series was not published until forty years after Goya’s death because it was not reconcilable with his role as a Spanish court painter who also had French clients.

Perceptive Observers: Art between Romanticism and Social Criticism

The decades prior to Impressionism were marked by a number of different artistic currents. Eugène Delacroix is considered the key exponent of French Romanticism. The paintings of his in the collection are characterized by the way in which they connect emotional intensity and political symbolism. King Henry IV and Gabrielle d’Estrées (1826) shows the 16th century king and his lover and political advisor Gabrielle d’Estrées at the French court.

The Barbizon School was an important, anti-academic artistic movement in France. Beginning around 1830, painters such as Camille Corot focused on working in nature, en plein air. They contributed significantly to changes in European art and influenced the development of Impressionism.

Gustave Courbet understood himself to be a realist painter. His involvement in the Paris Commune uprising in 1871 brought him a prison sentence. He painted many of his still lifes in the Sainte-Pélagie prison, where no live models were permitted.

Honoré Daumier was another socially critical artist. His paintings are often characterized by a satirical treatment of social and political subjects. Using expressive strokes and a dark palette, he portrayed the life of the working-class population. His sculptures of the series Les Parlementaires, with their exaggerated facial features, caricature the French parliamentarians – a biting commentary on the political elite of his time.

Prophet of Colour: Pierre Bonnard

When Pierre Bonnard began his art studies in Paris in 1888, the art world was at a turning point. Many young artists were seeking new forms of expression and tended to resist academic traditions. These artists also increasingly distanced themselves from Impressionism, which was enjoying success. Bonnard, working with Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and other like-minded artists, founded the Nabis group, who – in reference to the Hebrew derivation of their name – understood themselves as “prophets” of a new form of painting. They wanted to communicate more than visible reality, instead putting a strong emphasis on expressing feelings and thoughts.

The Scharf Collection contains outstanding paintings by Bonnard, including his centralwork The Large Bathtub, in which the artist portrays his wife Marthe, and Place Clichy, showing the bustling activity on this square near his studio in Paris.

Pierre Bonnard’s work is a connecting point where the Scharf Collection and the collections at the Nationalgalerie tie into and complement each other. The painting The Family of Claude Terrasse in the Garden at the Nationalgalerie assumes a special position in the artist’s oeuvre. Not only is it the largest work he had created up to that point, it is also one of his very few folding screens. Working with an originally Asian piece of furniture, Bonnard was combining Eastern and Western painting traditions, seen here in the planar composition of pictorial space and bodies and in the design of fabrics and landscape inspired by Japanese ornamentation.

Pioneer of Modern Lithography: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

A significant part of the Scharf Collection is the body of prints – complete except for only very few gaps – by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which was acquired by Otto Gerstenberg. This is the largest Toulouse-Lautrec collection worldwide.

Toulouse-Lautrec began working with the still young technology of lithography in 1891. Images could be drawn directly on a stone and printed in large editions at low cost. His innovative formal language made the artist a pioneer of modern lithography.

The French artist came from a wealthy, aristocratic family, but he turned his attention to the imagery of the stage and the brothel, which were held in poor regard. It has been established that the artist spent a good deal of time in Parisian brothels and even lived there for weeks. His lithographic portfolio Elles in particular testifies to his empathetic view of the women who worked there. He depicts them not in an eroticized way, but carrying out familiar, everyday activities.

From among his brothel works, a portrait-like sheet titled Clownesse Cha-U-Kao is particularly striking. As a clowness, she was practicing a male-dominated profession and was stepping forward self-confidently onstage as in life. Provocatively, Toulouse Lautrec shows her with her legs spread wide and gazing directly at the viewer.

Innovation in Poster Design: Toulouse-Lautrec as a Graphic

Artist Toulouse-Lautrec’s fame was earned through his posters. With their vibrant colours, they advertised for concert cafés and variety theatres like the Moulin Rouge but also for books, magazines, businesses and products. His designs were like none seen before: He worked with large surfaces, curving lines, stark contrasts and a spraying technique. The first poster maker to show and advertise specific stage artists, he portrayed the likes of La Goulue, Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant, thus contributing to the cult of celebrity at the time.

Sometimes, the artist turned stars into an artistic subject in their own right. His depictions of the dancer Loïe Fuller, for instance, have little in common with portraits: Instead of personal features, he shows only her flowing fabrics moving in sweeping circles through colourful light. He applied watercolours to these two-colour prints and completed them with an application of silver or gold dust.

In addition to his abstract subjects, there are works that impart the atmosphere onstage and backstage. Based on a painting, The Grand Theatre Box likely shows the profile view of Amande Brazier, the owner of a popular lesbian bar, attending a performance with a prostitute. In the neighbouring theatre box sits the driver of the Baron of Rothschild, whom the artist knew. The person in the middle, rather than looking at the stage, gazes at the neighbouring theatre boxes. In this way, the act of looking becomes itself a subject. Another aspect at work here is that the theatre box is not only enjoyed by privileged members of the upper middle class, but also by strong characters who stand at the edge of society.

Sharp Eyes and Biting Commentary: Toulouse-Lautrec as a Witness of His Time

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was an attentive observer of what was happening around him. The extent to which he saw himself and his attentiveness as part of a tradition is evident in his design of the cover for a new edition of Desastres de la Guerra, in which Goya had captured the horrors of war.

Toulouse-Lautrec designed a great number of advertisements, for example a poster for his friend the photographer Paul Sescau. With a wink in his eye, the artist pokes fun at the new medium’s claim to objective realism. With Toulouse-Lautrec, the photographer remains invisible, his model is turned away from him and is wearing a face mask and a dress covered in question marks.

The skating figure of Misia Nathanson is staged in a similarly sophisticated manner. She was married to the publisher of the art and literary magazine La Revue blanche, for whose covers she often posed. The picture for the magazine La Vache enragée shows the titular “enraged cow” which, representing revolutionary artists, chases a wealthy bourgeois man. However, in extreme cases, attacks on the state order could end under the guillotine’s blade, as Toulouse-Lautrec illustrates in an advertisement for the daily newspaper Le Matin. And Toulouse-Lautrec also designed the poster for a book by the journalist Victor Joze, which portrayed Berlin – the “Babylon of Germany” – as both militaristic and corrupt.

Fragmentations of Everyday Life: Cubism

After Impressionism, Cubism was the next groundbreaking innovation in modern art. With their paintings and collages, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and later also Juan Gris had the most decisive influence on this style. Henri Laurens, working in the medium of sculpture, shaped Cubism with artistic expression of his own.

The goal of Cubism was to represent the multi-layered and multi-dimensional nature of reality by deconstructing shapes and breaking them down to their basic geometric forms. In painting, this resulted in works which show subjects from different viewing angles at the same time and which use collaged materials to combine and connect different forms of reality. A significant example of this is Picasso’s collage Guitar andSheet Music.

Everyday objects like bottles, glasses, newspapers and playing cards were elevated to pictorial subject matter. Fragmented in Cubist style, they offered new perspectives on worlds of the everyday like cafés as social meeting points or the artist studio as a place of creativity. Following this first phase marked by fragmentation, decomposition and systematic analysis, so-called Analytical Cubism, artists experimented increasingly with joining surfaces and forms together: Exponents of Synthetic Cubisminclude Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. As the latter had a great fondness of cylindrical shapes, he was also referred to as a “Tubist”.

The ideas of Cubism had a decisive influence on conceptions of space, form and abstraction in modernism.

Colour, Form and Gesture: Figuration and Abstraction after 1945

After 1945, art evolved in a tension between figuration and abstraction. Sam Francis and Maurice Estève are prime examples of the development of abstraction after 1945. In their bright and radiant pictures, colour itself becomes a vehicle of expression. Estève was among the artists of the Nouvelle École de Paris who were very actively supported by the collector Walther Scharf, who sometimes also sold their art. Scharf’s son René, who worked in New York for a long time, complemented the collection’s French orientation with a North American perspective when he added works by Sam Francis.

Since his relocation to Berlin, René Scharf and his wife Christiane have been expanding the collection by adding contemporary works, including from Berlin’s art scene.

Through its sombre palette and the zebra head that is larger than life, Jonas Burgert’s Night Trick evokes elements of the so-called Dark Romanticism of the late 19th century, which engaged with the uncanny and the supernatural. The hybrid creatures seen in Katja Novitskova’s Earthware are also located between reality and nightmare, while in Martin Eder’s work the cute and the monstrous appear side by side. His Narcissus works with the ancient myth of the young man who falls in love with his mirror image. Here, however, the youth is replaced by a cat, a subject that has been very popular in social networks.

A Collection for the Future: Aspects of Contemporary Art

The artistic positions shown in this room are connected by material, movement, colour and form. Gotthard Graubner described his cushion-like works as “colour-space bodies”. The deep impression of colour they create is achieved through multiple paint applications on a highly absorbent fabric surface. The painting shown here is one of the smaller works. All of Graubner’s cushion-like works have in common that they walk the line between panel painting and object and create the experience of pure colour.

Katharina Grosse was Graubner’s student at the art academy in Düsseldorf. She sometimes works with very large surfaces – going across entire rooms, the roofs of houses and façades. With the two paintings in the Scharf Collection, she moves within the confines of the painting surface, with the paint applications and the paints themselves becoming the event.

Anselm Reyle works with applications of objects, foils and mirrors on the image area, extending it into three-dimensional space. The functional and decorative materials he uses are elements taken from consumer society. For Reyle, they become the material of his artistic contemplation about what painting can be today.

The sculptor Tony Cragg shares with Graubner and Grosse his close connection to the Düsseldorf art academy. He taught there and also served as its director for several years. Movement has always played an important role in his sculptures, ensuing from his keen interest in natural structures and processes of organic growth.